David Bleich - The Materiality of Language and the Pedagogy of Exchange - Pedagogy 1:1 Materiality and Genre

The many recent discussions of genre suggest that this path of inquiry has several sources that overlap with the sources of the modern versions of the materiality of language. These common sources include Ludwig Wittgenstein's understanding of speech ceremonies, schemata, and conventions as "language games" and "forms of life"; M. M. Bakhtin's idea of speech genres; J. L. Austin's speech act theory; and Tzvetan Todorov's idea of discourse genres. 3 This overlap looks like the development of a Kuhnian paradigm shift regarding what language is, a shift that urges materiality and genre as constitutive aspects of language. Nevertheless, it is also the case that discussions of genre in the pedagogy of rhetoric and literacy after Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Todorov do not recognize a fundamental role for the materiality of language. This omission reduces the use-value of the genre idea. The materiality of language is part of a concept of genre and renders the genre idea more versatile in teaching, an issue to which I return later in this essay.